LED demon mask is way cooler than what you have planned for Halloween

You might think that your Halloween costume is really cool, but you have been bested. Phil from Adafruit has put all of humanity to shame with his custom built LED demon mask. The effect is incredibly cool, and even a little scary. It could probably give kids nightmares, but it’s a great project for makers.

Phil used a plain white mask as the base for the contraption, but you can use any basic Halloween mask. The glowing animated eyes are produced with the Adafruit LED matrix backpack. Both eyes are on the same IC2 address to keep everything in sync. The mouth is made up of three LED matrices on a separate IC2.

The moving eyes are cool, but the way the mouth syncs up with the wearer’s speech is the really awesome part. This is accomplished with an Arduino-based voice changer. A small microphone near the mouth picks up the voice, makes it sound scary, and also triggers the LED mouth movements with the aid of the Arduino controller.

The electronics are mounted on a thin plexiglass backing that is attached to the mask. To avoid damage to the electronics from moisture, vulnerable bits are sealed in plastic, or coated with glue. The prototype doesn’t yet have power and speakers built in, but Phil plans to build some sort of chest plate that should be able to house the necessary batteries and audio output for the voice.

Phil completed the effect by stretching a Morphsuit body suit over the mask (and himself). This covers up all the unsightly electronics, and still lets the LEDs shine through. Best arduino-based costume ever? Probably.